


Understanding

by decaf_kitty



Category: Spy vs Spy
Genre: Blood and Injury, Hospitalization, M/M, Rival Relationship, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-06 20:52:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18225287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decaf_kitty/pseuds/decaf_kitty
Summary: It's a story as old as time: two enemies locked in eternal combat.But this time, late night in an American Emergency Room, two rival spies confront the consequences of their fighting - and come to a different sort of understanding with each other.





	Understanding

**Author's Note:**

> Way back in 2008, on a site called y!gallery, I began writing fan fiction for the very unusual fandom of Spy vs Spy, the old Cold War comic, under the name "decafkitty." I had been inspired by a prolific fan artist named DarkPenguin and her fascinating stylized work. I ended up writing a novel called "Handcuffs" and a series of AU short stories based on the pairing. 
> 
> While "Handcuffs" might be one day published with a press, the short stories have been just sitting, gathering dust, on my hard drive, for the last decade, so I've decided to post them for the world once again. y!gallery died sometime in 2016, meaning my old SvS fan fiction vanished from the Internet with the site's death. This story was written in 2008-2009, edited just a little bit in 2019.
> 
> Warning: The results of graphic violence are depicted throughout the story. 
> 
> FYI: There's no canon for Spy vs Spy. It's literally two spies fighting, nothing more than that. But... couldn't it be so much more?
> 
> I hope you enjoy. 
> 
> ____

_This is a first._

White stared blankly at the bearded American doctor pushing his crash cart. He could barely look anywhere else with the emergency neck brace keeping his vision rigid and straight. The ambulance worker who had pumped forsaken liquids into his system was chattering deafeningly fast in English, which White understood normally very well but certainly not today. 

He blinked once, and, when his eyelids opened again, his eyes had fixed down on his blood-soaked uniform. His jacket pushed aside, his collared shirt ripped up the middle, the space formerly known as his lower left ribcage showing no signs of prettiness, only torn off pale skin, lots of red blood, and several grungy specks of bone. He could still see his black boots, properly polished, but he started to fade out whenever he looked back up at the doctor, who was now saying something to him urgently like he should reply.

White barely got a chance to blink before they hauled the crash cart into one of the emergency rooms and began to transfer him from the cart to a more solid table to operate on him. 

In a thick daze, he stayed still, thinking in Russian.

**

_Not fucking again!_

Black tried valiantly to struggle against the straps over him, actually put there to keep him from hurting his spine if he twisted or jerked because of movement. The lady doctor snapped at him, “Sir, keep still,” while the ambulance worker, a short man with dark eyes, explained quickly how they found him. “He’s shot in the abdomen, multiple lacerations to his liver, possible other organs –”

Just as the lady doctor glanced up to ask the worker another question, she paused, stiffening slightly, even as they moved swiftly to the operating room. “Did he -? Is that the guy…?” she asked, a hard edge of anxiety hitting her voice. 

The worker turned as Black looked over, as much as he could, to find his typically white-clad rival being hauled into the room next to his. He looked just about the same since they had last been together in the street, when Black had let loose some horrible new bullet designed by his embassy and White had put a rather plain one pleasantly into his stomach. His long-time rival had appeared disturbed during the whole ordeal, expressions actively flooding his face, hands frantically moving, body so tense.

Black’s eyebrows twitched.

As his counterpart disappeared into the next room, White did not look so busy, so violently energetic. A matter of fact, he looked…

Well, he looked like he was dying.

Black’s facial features shifted as he, too, was brought into the emergency room adjacent to his rival’s, being moved from cart to table, having new needles pushed in, scalpels aiming for his abdomen. 

He suddenly didn’t like the idea of White being dead.

**

White was not sure if they had put him under or if he had gone unconscious, but he woke up as they were pulling pieces of the Black Nation bullet out of his side. 

His eyes slitted open just slightly. He watched the doctors rushing to save him, the nurses obediently following orders, intent on rescuing him, this anonymous man with a truly bizarre wound in the early morning hours of their overnight shift. 

So he was awake and they had not caught on yet, which he assumed meant he was supposed to be unconscious but was not, probably because he was the White Spy of _the_ White Nation and medicine stopped him only as much as a bullet did. 

He slanted an unworried glance over to the left, his head unmoving. Something shined by his stomach, but he did not mind the hints of crazy pain through the drugs or the fact he was being operated on. Instead, he wondered vaguely how he got here. He had never been in an American hospital. It was an adventure he had not wanted to experience…

Then White saw his emergency room neighbor, thanks to his good eyesight and the height of Black as he was moved from crash cart to operating table. 

He must have made a sound, because suddenly lights were in his eyes, and the nearest doctor was questioning him, seeming awfully surprised at his alertness. 

White replied calmly, “It’s fine. Please, keep operating.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed in confusion, the nurses around him paused for just a weird, small moment, and it was then White realized he had spoken Russian to them.

**

Black refused to find sleep in the emergency room.

They shot him up with a few different things, tried to put something over his face to knock him out, but Black simply looked angrily up at them, they stared back at him in bewildered shock, and the lady doctor growled, “We have to operate. He’ll go under soon.”

He had seen White… he had seen White looking at him in the other room.

He looked positively dead.

Black felt his face constrict into a grimace. 

Oh, he wasn’t liking this, he wasn’t liking this at all.

So, the Black Spy sat up, pushed the lady doctor, and swung off the table, one hand automatically pawing at his insides, keeping them in. Some nurse shouted for security, another backed the hell out of his way. The doctor stared at him from the floor, just as Black pushed through the double doors leading to White’s room.

**

The doctors and nurses and associates and assistants and all these people around him were now speaking rapidly in English to the point White’s head began to actually hurt through all the pain-killers flushing through his system. 

He frowned, wincing slightly. 

Some new voice found his ears, and, at first, he ignored it like the others, but then he recognized it and glanced over to the left, where the sound had come from.

His black-attired rival stood beside him. His white tie was over his shoulder, splattered with blood, and his black shirt had been torn down the middle, almost exactly like White’s had. Some strange organ was trying to escape his abdomen as he stood there beside White. In the background, White could just barely see nurses hovering, unsure what to do. The doctors in his room had shut up completely, thankfully, so blessedly thankfully. 

No one had tried to approach Black, either.

White said as clear as he could, “I can’t understand them.”

Black’s face changed oddly, but White only blinked tiredly, not wanting to think about what it meant. Then his rival replied easily, “That’s because you’re speaking Russian. You must have hit your head.”

White pulled one of his arms up, dragging needles and IV lines with him. He pushed it numbly against his face where suddenly his forehead had begun to itch. He absently responded to his motionless rival, “But I can understand you.”

“That’s because I’m speaking Russian, White.”

“Oh,” he replied dumbly. He struggled more with his fingers, which he could not feel, but he could tell he was missing the itchy spot right where his hair started. 

Still trying and still failing, White looked at his rival once again.

**

Black could hear the multitude of voices outside the emergency room, though none of the professionals near him said a thing as he spoke to his rival in Russian. 

White, for whatever reason, had been attempting to scratch the open wound at his hairline. It took Black a few moments as he held his insides inside to realize that White probably did not know he had sustained a head injury as well as his chest wound. That would explain why he was so dazed, so limp, so pale…

White looked at him then, oh so piteously.

Black’s eyebrows twitched.

White opened his mouth to say something, then he flinched, and his hand dropped clumsily to the side of the table and convulsed slightly before going still. His rival frowned in disapproval at his fingers then just laid there unhappily. 

Black closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them as he rose his free hand to White’s brow. His rival still had the dignity to wince a little bit, but he did not move otherwise. Black found himself smiling minutely at that – so his counterpart had spirit remaining in his bones, in his body. 

Good.

He scratched around the wound with his bloody fingers, the tiny shreds of his nails pushing gently into the reddened, streaked skin. 

Underneath him, White sighed aloud in relief.

“Oh, God, thank you,” he breathed in Russian, closing his eyes in pleasure.

**  


_Thank God, the itch is gone._

White hazily reopened his eyes and saw Black smiling softly at him.

It struck him suddenly that he had no idea why Black was not beating his head in with anything in the room – anything, another person, even. Fear didn’t cross his face, only faint surprise, before he placed the pieces together. 

Perhaps his only somewhat brilliant rival had not realized his new bullet would do all this or send him flying off the roof of the building into the street. Perhaps he also did not expect when he came to see if White was alive that he would get shot in the stomach. 

So perhaps Black didn’t want things to turn out how they did. 

Dying in an American E.R. certainly was not a part of his plan, either.

White smiled lightly, then abruptly more manically. 

Black paused, went to remove his hand.

White’s right snapped through the air and caught him insanely hard on his elbow, keeping his arm violently straight, nearly causing Black's fingers to spasm from the pressure on his muscles. 

Black uttered something in English very fast, but White didn’t catch it and only yanked his rival down towards him, which the unstable, rather weakened spy could not fight against. 

As his dark counterpart ended up near his stiff face, White looked up at him, knowing his glazed eyes probably seemed sinister as hell. Black’s eyebrows were high on his face, his mouth tight, his eyes wide. He didn’t know what was going on in his pale rival’s mind.

So, of course, White shared with him. 

“I’m going to get better from this. When I do, I’m coming after you.”

Black froze for a second.

Then he smiled broadly and answered the challenge. “Good.”

**

Black could feel security’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. He could see his rival’s own set of doctors coming in to further operate on him, continue whatever they were doing to him. And he knew that he should go lay down, his intestines were getting heavy. 

But leaving White like that… didn’t suit him.

So, still firmly held in his counterpart’s grip, he pushed forward and forced a kiss on White’s blood-streaked cheek.

As he pulled away, he saw White’s smile go from wild to something he had never seen nor expected from his rival. 

He looked darkly pleased, he looked sultry and satisfied and strangely sensual.

And then White purred in Russian, “I will find you, Black. I will find you and fuck you.” His eyelids drooped slowly, and a new line of red blood poured down his face. “And you will scream my name, rival. You… will…”

Black’s heart pounded right through his ribs as his counterpart trailed off, going unconscious as he promised such wicked, wondrous things. 

He could sense White was still awake, just a little.

So he swore quietly in Russian, “Not if I find you first, White.”

Then Black allowed himself to be brought back to the operating table and went under in a matter of seconds.

Finally.


End file.
